Today I launched ePatient 2015 – 15 Surprising Trends Changing Healthcare, my newest book focused on the future of healthcare. It might seem like an odd project for me to launch – being a marketing guy. This is the unexpected story of why and how I did it (along with my co-author Fard Johnmar), and why the book might be interesting for you whether you work in the healthcare industry or not. Here is the presentation we used at the Health 2.0 Conference today to launch the book (#health2con):

One of the best reasons to quit your day job is so you can find the time to make your big ideas into reality. About two years ago, I started thinking about this book while I was still at Ogilvy and leading a lot of digital healthcare work. At that point, the idea was to focus on how doctors use social media.

As I continued thinking about the future of healthcare and watched the landscape changes happening across the world – both due to technology changes and political changes – it became clear that the story was much bigger than doctors on social networks. Something fundamental was changing in healthcare and no one was explaining it in a way that anyone could understand. The closest I ever found was Dan Roam’s amazing presentation explaining healthcare – but it was intentionally from the point of view of who pays for healthcare. I have always been more interested in how healthcare itself is changing, rather than focusing on who pays for it.

So last year, I approached one of the smartest people I know in the healthcare space – a digital health care futurist and researcher named Fard Johnmar who runs his own health innovation consultancy called Enspektos. We started talking about collaborating on a book, and began the planning for it. Starting last October we began doing the research, interviewing entrepreneurs and practitioners within healthcare and conducting original research through the digihealth pulse survey – the world’s first tracking study of digitally active epatients.

Together we analyzed the results and combined them with curated research from news reports, published studies and the efforts of startups across the health space. Eventually, we ended up with 15 trends that we felt defined what would matter for the future of healthcare, in the next 18 months and beyond. Then we aggregated them into 3 major themes described in the infographic below:

3 Themes On How Healthcare Is Changing

THEME #1 – HEALTH HYPEREFFICIENCY
Innovations in computing technologies are helping to make health and medical care more efficient, safe and effective for all patients.

THEME #2 – THE PERSONALIZED HEALTH MOVEMENT
A philosophical and operational shift that considers the unique genetics, behaviors and medical histories of individuals instead of treating them based on inflexible or non-personalized guidelines and traditions.

THEME #3 – DIGITAL PEER-TO-PEER HEALTHCARE
A range of Web, social and mobile tools are helping patients collaborate on things like navigating the new health insurance landscape, selecting providers, assisting in their own care and providing emotional support.